Monday, August 12, 2013

"Sex Offenders"

The diligent reporter of a
local weekly publication discovered that sex offenders live in some
of the larger apartment buildings in the city. He went and
interviewed a few residents, building owners and managers, as well as
local politicians. He was clearly trying to be fair and stressed that
protecting the public was important but so is protecting the rights
of convicted felons.

But the entire discussion used
the prevailing stereotypes which make it impossible to discuss these
problems usefully.

In order to see this, ask
yourself these questions

1. Who are these sex offenders?
When the media discuss sex offenders they never fail to mention
protecting our children in the next paragraph. The implication is
clear: all sex offenders are pedophiles. But that is of course
completely false. Among sex offenders are adults who prey on children
and others who force sex on adults. But there are also
exhibitionists, there are consumers and purveyors of child
pornography, (only a very small percentage of consumers of child
pornography ever molest anyone sexually), there are stalkers and
gropers, and persons guilty of sexual harassment, and, of course,
persons arrested for urinating in public.

2. How dangerous are unknown
pedophiles to our children? The threat of sexual harm to children and
adults from strangers are relatively small. The overwhelming majority
of sexual assaults or molestations come from people the victim knows,
their relatives or acquaintances of the family.

3. What are the criteria for
being labeled a sex offender? A certain number of people are called
sex offenders for quite bizarre reasons. Being arrested for urinating
in public will end you up as a sex offender. If a 16-year-old boy has
sex with a 14-year-old girl, he will spend the remainder of his life
labeled a sex offender. The global label of "sex offender"
is applied widely and wildly and sometimes quite inappropriately.
This practice stirs up unnecessary fears and hatred.

4. Can sex offenders ever put
their crimes behind them and become regular citizens? If arrested,
tried, and convicted, sex offenders in these different categories
spend many years in prison. Having once served their time, they
emerge from prison only to have to register as sex offenders. In many
states their faces will show up on sex offender websites with their
address and other information. Not surprisingly many convicted sex
offenders have serious difficulties finding a job, and frequently
need to keep changing their address because they are expelled from
their current apartment. A few have seen their houses burned down.
Their punishment never ceases.

5. Is that fair? We live in a
dangerous world and have good reasons to fear for our children. It is
important to know where the dangers lurk. But the registries of sex
offenders have to do with more than the safety of our children and
ourselves. After all we do not have registries of murderers or those
guilty of armed robbery. We do not have registries of men convicted
of family violence. We do not have registries of men who have
abandoned children they fathered and the mothers of those children.
It would surely be important for women looking for partners and for
love to know that this attractive guy spent time in prison for
beating up a previous partner and her
children, or to know that this hunk
has fathered children elsewhere and abandoned them.

Scams victimizing older people
are quite common. It would be helpful to seniors to be able to check
out a list of persons convicted of taking advantage of the elderly
before trusting someone with their hard-earned money.

This morning's paper reports
that banks still foreclose on mortgages illegally. It would be very
useful for those looking for a mortgage to know which banks ignore
the laws governing foreclosures. It would protect many sick people if
there were a registry of compounding pharmacies selling unsafe
products.

But we only have registries for
sex offenders. And those registries includes a significant number of
persons who should not be punished anymore than they have been
already.

6. How dangerous are convicted
sex offenders? Registries of sex offenders are often justified on the
grounds that sex offenders tend to reoffend. In recent years there
have been many studies of this. - “Sex offenders were less likely
than non-sex offenders to be rearrested for any offense –– 43
percent of sex offenders versus 68 percent of non-sex offenders. But
sex offenders were about four times more likely than non-sex
offenders to be arrested for another sex crime after their discharge
from prison –– 5.3 percent of sex offenders versus 1.3 percent of
non-sex offenders.” (http://ac360.blogs.
cnn.com/2009/08/28/recidivism-rates-for-sex-offenders/).
Not only is the recidivism rate for sex offenders lower than that for
some other categories of criminals. But many sex offenders are
arrested a second time not for sexual crimes but for some other
infractions
of the law. The sexual threat they pose is relatively small

By using a general category of
“sex offender” we tar very different persons with
the same brush; we thereby do serious injustices. Some of the people
included in the registry provisions should not be there. A
significant number of people who were in prison for sexual offenses
have since their release led blameless lives. They should be taken
off the registries. We should drop the general designation "sex
offenders" and differentiate between consumers of child
pornography, for instance, and exhibitionists, and pedophiles, and
those guilty of incest.

Journalists should resist using
misleading stereotypes even if that titillates their readers (and
therefore sells newspapers) because it perpetuates existing
injustices.